Peaky Blinders: How does Steve Knight's film Serenity compare to Peaky Blinders?

PEAKY BLINDERS is set to be returning to the BBC later this year but ahead of the Cillian Murphy series, creator Steve Knight has been working on a very different project. Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, Knight opened up about how working on his Hollywood movie Serenity compared to Peaky Blinders.

Serenity is a brand new psychological thriller starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. The movie was written and directed by Peaky Blinders and Taboo creator Steve Knight, who shared his thoughts about the experience between working on TV shows versus films. Serenity follows a fisherman called Baker Dill (played by McConaughey), who is left in a predicament when his ex-girlfriend Karen Zariakas (Hathaway) shows up out of the blue with a murderous proposition that could see him making a $10 million dollars.

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“So we shot it for real. I think it’s worth it because you can tell, audiences can tell if it’s real or not.”

But he described the process as “quite a bit logistical exercise” and “an education” because of the nature of hauling boats and out of ports for filming as well as cast getting seasick.

Knight first came up with the idea for Serenity while on a fishing trip to Saint Lucia. He was on board a boat called Serenity with a congenial captain who transformed as soon as a fish started to bite on the line, revealing: “Only he and the fish existed.”

Knight is better known for his writing work having penned scripts for The Girl in the Spider's Web, Dirty Pretty Things and All About Me as well as creating quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Peaky Binders season 5 will return later this year (Image: BBC)

He has also directed a number of films including Locke with Tom Hardy and Redemption with Jason Statham.

He said: “If I’m going to direct a film, I’m going to choose one that’s quite experimental and break the rules because I think filmmaking attracts a lot of rules, especially these days.

“So I wanted to direct something where you create a world, you create a reality and then totally undermine it and destroy it and see what happens.”

On whether he’d want to direct a series of Peaky Blinders, Knight said he’d want to do the last-ever episode of the drama but not a whole series because it would be a huge undertaking.